An advertiser, such as Ford® or McDonald's®, generally contracts a creative agency for ads to be placed in various media for the advertiser's products. Such media may include TV, radio, Internet ads (e.g., banner display ads, textual ads, streaming ads, mobile phone ads), print media ads (e.g., ads in newspapers, magazines and posters). It is quite possible that the advertiser may engage one or more creative agencies that specialize in creating ads for one or more of the above media.
The search advertising marketplace generates billions of dollars in revenue each year for a search engine, for example, Yahoo!®. The search marketing marketplace works on a cost-per-click (CPC) model. When a consumer performs a search query online and clicks on a sponsored search text ad, a company like Yahoo!® is paid by the respective advertiser. Consumers tend to click on more relevant ads. It is the company's best interest to show the most relevant ads to consumers, in order to get more clicks on these ads. In order to do this, the company needs to gather information about consumers' search behavior and click behavior. Search behavior is what the consumer searches. Primary evidence for search behavior is the key words used in the consumer search. Click behavior is what the consumer clicks on the search page after a search. The clicks may include clicking to select an ad, clicking to close an ad, etc. The company can then use this information to target relevant ads to different consumers.
In the CPC model, there are two important events—search events and click events. Search events occur when a consumer performs a search query. Click events occur when a consumer clicks on a sponsored text ad. Web servers of a company like Yahoo!® collect search events when a consumer performs a query on the company's search page. URLs of the ads on the search result webpage may contain the click event information. The company wants to collect and analyze the search and click events in order to build a model for query-to-text ad relevance. If the company can learn which ads are more relevant, then the company can target these ads to consumers and get a higher click-through rate (CTR).
Perhaps what is more difficult is that there is currently no way for a company like Yahoo!® to tell non-search advertisers whether or not a particular Internet search was related to a particular non-search ad. Non-search advertisers include advertisers who place TV ads, radio ads or Internet-based visual ads (e.g., display ads, video ads, etc.). For example, a consumer may see a JCPenney® TV commercial related to diamond jewelry. That consumer may subsequently perform an Internet search based on the JCPenney® ad, which may have sparked the consumer's interest in getting an engagement ring for his fiance. It is difficult for advertisers like JCPenney® to understand effects that their audio-visual ad campaigns have on consumers who see an offline ad and later do Internet searches.